The Interrogative plaster - Chambers, Oswald

Job 8

If thou couldst empty all thyself of self.

Like to a shell dishabited,

then might he find thee on the ocean shelf,

and saythis is not dead,

and fill thee with himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou,

and hast such shrewd activity,

that, when he comes, he says: this is enow

unto it selftwere better let it be:

it is so small and full, there is no room for me.

T. E. Brown12

Bildad differs from eliphaz in his condemnation of job: eliphaz declares straight off that job is wrong, while bildad takes another linethat of asking questions; neither of them come anywhere near the reason for jobs suffering. There is an element of yesbut in us all, and for most of us the problems that are nearly strangling a man have no meaning, they seem extravagant and wild. Bildad did not begin to detect where the real problem of jobs suffering lay, and we must beware in our attitude toward people who are suffering that we do not blunder by imagining our point of view to be the only one. Bildad tries the application of the interrogative plaster, he puts job off by asking questions. That is generally the way of the man who refuses to face problems.

1. The plaint of how ( job 8:12)

then answered bildad the shuhite and said, how long wilt thou speak these things? And how long shall the words of thy mouth be like a strong wind?

Bildad turns attention away from what is making job speak to his actual wordswhy do you talk so much? But he does not take the trouble to find out the reason. When we come across a foul-mouthed, blasphemous man any number of us are ready to reprove him for the one who will try to discover why he speaks thus. Job is looking for someone who will understand what lies behind his talk, but he finds only those who are far removed from his problem.

To say that because job lived in another dispensation therefore what he went through does not apply to us, is an easy, artificial shifting of the ground. There are characteristics which are different, but the problems manifested in the book of job remain the same to this day. According to consistent argument, the new testament saint should be leagues ahead of the old testament saint, but in reality no character in the new testament is superior to those in the old testament. The revelation of redemption given through our lord Jesus Christ is retrospective in our day; in the old testament it is prospective. Job goes down to the heart of the problems that make the redemption necessary, while bildad, with his interrogative plaster and pious dealing with the problems, is really shirking the whole thing.

2. The place of doth ( job 8:3)

doth god pervert judgement? Or doth the almighty pervert justice?

The trick of the sincere shirker is indicated in bildad, which is always the result of being hit unexpectedly. We are all sincere shirkers, more or less; when we find ourselves suddenly discerned we turn the discernment off to something else for the time being (cf. John 4:1620). In putting these abstractions before job, bildad is implying that jobs problem is not so difficult to understand: his suffering is caused by his own wrongdoing, and gods judgement is perfectly right. It is a trying thing to continue with a man who persists in giving an abstract supposition as a concrete fact.

3. The philosophy of if ( job 8:46)

if thy children have sinned against him, . . . If thou wouldest seek unto god betimes, . . . If thou wert pure and upright. . . .

The implication behind all these suppositions is: even if you are as wrong as eliphaz has made out, you are not suffering so much as you imagine, and there is no big problem at the heart of things. God is not unjust, but you are, and that is the reason for it all. When problems are pressing very hard there is always someone who brings a suggestion of if, or but, or how, to take us off the track. If our problems can be solved by other men, they are not problems but simply muddles. When we come to the real downright problems of life, which have no explicit answer saving by the designer of life, we are exactly where job was, and we can understand his petulance with those who tried to answer him. If jobs friends had remained dumb and reverent with what they did

Not understand, as they did during the first seven days, they would have been a great sustaining to him, and they too would have approached the place job ultimately reached and would not have been rebuked by god. The gospel of temperament works very well if you are suffering only from psychical neuralgia, so to speak, and all you need is a cup of tea; but if you have a real deep complaint, the injunction to cheer up is an insult. What is the use of telling a woman who has lost her husband and sons in the war to cheer up and look on the bright side? There is no bright side, it is abso- lute blackness, and if god cannot come to her help, truly she is in a pitiable condition. It is part of the role of a man to be honest enough to know when he is up against cases like this. A gospel based on preconceived notions is merely an irritant. Bildad had his creed and his notion of god: job does not fit into these, there- fore it is a bad look out for job my point of view of god cannot be wrong, therefore you must be.

4. The pose of platitude ( job 8:710)

for enquire, i pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers: . . . Shall not they teach thee, and tell thee, and utter words out of their heart?

The line bildad takes up in these verses is like a man telling the inmates of an asylum that it is better being sane than madbut meantime they are mad! Bildad denies that job is facing a problem never faced by his fathers. We are apt to forget that there is always an element in human suffering never there before. Tennyson puts this finely in in memoriam:

One writes that, other friends remain

That loss is common to the race

And common is the commonplace,

And vacant chaff well meant for grain

That loss is common would not make

My own less bitter, rather more:

Too common! Never morning wore

To evening, but some heart did break.

There is a great deal in both joy and sorrow that is similar in every ones case, but always one element entirely different; the platitudinarian evades this. On the human side the only thing to do for a man who is up against these deeper problems is to remain kindly agnostic. The biggest benediction one man can find in another is not in his words, but that he implies: i do not know the answer to your problem, all i can say is that god alone must know; let us go to him.

It would have been much more to the point if the friends had begun to intercede for job; if they had said, this is a matter for god, not for us; our creed cannot begin to touch it; but all they did was to take to chatter magging 13 and telling job that he was wrong. When god emerged, he put his imprint on what job had said of him, and his disapproval on what the friends had said. If redemption is not the basis of human life, and prayer mans only resource, then we have followed cunningly devised fables. Over and over again during this war men have turned to prayer, not in the extreme of weakness, but of limitation; whenever a man gets beyond the limit he unconsciously turns to god. Eliphaz claimed to know exactly where job was, and bildad claims the same thing. Job was hurt, and these men tried to heal him with platitudes. The place for the comforter is not that of one who preaches, but of the comrade who says nothing, but prays to god about the matter. The biggest thing you can do for those who are suffering is not to talk platitudes, not to ask questions, but to get into contact with god, and the greater works will be done by prayer (see john 14:1213). Jobs friends never once prayed for him; all they did was to try and make coin for the enrichment of their own creed out of his sufferings. We are not intended to understand life. Life makes us what we are, but life belongs to god. If i can understand a thing and can define it, i am its master. I cannot understand or define life; i cannot understand or define god; consequently i am master of neither. Logic and reason are always on the hunt for definition, and anything that cannot be defined is apt to be defied, rationalism usually defies god and defies life; it will not have anything that cannot be defined on a rational basis, forgetting that the things that make up elemental human life cannot be defined. There are teachers to-day who play the fool on these elemental lines; they declare that they can give guidance, but they only succeed in doing a fathomless amount of harm. A man is a criminal for knowing some things, he has no right to know them. The primal curse of god was on adam when he ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam was intended to know good and evil, but not by eating of the fruit of the tree; god wanted him to know good and evil in the way Jesus Christ knew it, viz. , by simple obedience to his father. None of us by nature knows good and evil in this way, and when we are born from above we have to take care that we deal with reverence with the elemental things underlying life.

5. The point of can ( job 8:11)

can the rush grow up without mire? Can the flag grow without water?

Bildad uses an argument from nature and he tries to make his argument consistent with his illustration. We are apt to run an illustration to death in logical sequence; the bible never does. An illustration should simply be a window which does not call attention to itself. If you take an illustration from nature and apply it to a mans moral life or spiritual life, you will not be true to facts because the natural law does not work in the spiritual world. In the first place, a law is not a concrete thing, but a constructive mental abstraction whereby the human mind explains what it sees. God says, and i will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten . . . ; that is not a natural law, and yet it is what happens in the spiritual world. In the natural world it is impossible to be made all over again, but in the spiritual world it is exactly what Jesus Christ makes possible. Verily, verily, i say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of god (john 3:3). What is true is that as there is a law in the natural world so there is a law in the spiritual world, i. E. , a way of explaining things, but the law is not the same in both worlds. Bildad takes his illustration from the rush and the flag and applies it to job, but he is more concerned about being consistent with his illustration than with the facts of jobs experience. If you are a logician you may often gain your point in a debate and yet feel yourself in the wrong. You get the best of it in disputing with some people because their minds are not clever, but when you get away from your flush of triumph you feel you have missed the point altogether; you have won on debate, but not on fact. You cannot get at the basis of things by disputing. Our lord himself comes off second best every time in a logical argument, and yet you know that he has in reality come off more than conqueror. Jesus Christ lived in the moral domain and, in a sense, the intellect is of no use there. Intellect is not a guide, but an instrument.

6. The practice of piousness ( job 8:1222)

behold, god will not cast away a perfect man, neither will he help the evil doers. ( job 8:20)

Bildad is cultivating the margin of his eyesight, so to speak. This is a trick of the piousness not based on a personal relationship to god. Bildad is apparently speaking of an abstraction while all the time he is criticising jobit is job who is the hypocrite and the fraud. It is not meanness in bildad that makes him do this, but limitedness he is all replete with very thou. Bildad has never seen god, while job is getting near the place where he will see him. All the god bil- dad has is his creed; if he had known the real god he would have prayed to him, and would have recognised the facts that were too big for him. Whenever we put belief in a creed in place of belief in god, we become this particular kind of humbug. To imply wrong by my right is the trick of every man who puts his creed before his relationship to god. During this war many a man has come to find the difference between his creed and god. At first a man imagines he has backslidden because he has lost belief in his beliefs, but later on he finds he has gained god, i. E. , he has come across reality. If reality is not to be found in god, then god is not found anywhere. If god is only a creed or a statement of religious belief, then he is not real; but if god is, as the book of job brings to light, one with whom a man gets into personal con- tact in other ways than by his intellect, then any man who touches the reality of things, touches god